This is a message from Patrick Volkerding in regards to his thoughts on Gnome and Slackware. It was originally posted on the Dropline Gnome Forum. Editor's note: Pat has made similar comments to me as well regarding Gnome's bugs and maintainance problems.

Why does the Gnome fanboys try to make politics out of a pure technical problem, and please RTFA before answering. Pretty simple reasons if you read what Pat says.

"Probably 1/3 of development time here is used maintaining GNOME, and *most* of the bug reports I get have something to do with GNOME (and aren't bugs I caused, or can fix). KDE, on the other hand, tends to build using the existing build scripts with no changes at all. I can start the build and come back to finished packages in a few hours. A GNOME update usually takes at least a week of manual labor, and another week of cleaning up broken things"

The short version, clean up the crap aka GNOME build system and there are no reasons not to include it in Slack. And spending the time elswere will overall result in a much better distro.